Faculty Research Leave Awards

Carl Ernst (Religious Studies) will be working on his project The poetry of al-Hallaj: A translation and study. Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj (the Sufi mystic executed in 922 in Baghdad) was one of the most powerful and controversial religious thinkers in early Islam, known especially for his ecstatic sayings (e.g., “I am the Truth”). His writings are a major contribution to the early Arabic literature of Islamic mysticism or Sufism. While his poetry is the largest corpus of Arabic poetry by any early Sufi, only a small portion of it has been translated into English. Ernst plans to produce a complete literary translation of his poems (ed. Massignon 1955, al-Shaybi 1973, rev. 1984, etc.) with a contextual interpretation and notes, with reference to recent scholarship, including translations of his works in European and Middle Eastern languages. For further information (including links to contemporary musical settings of his Arabic poems), see http://www.unc.edu/courses/2009spring/reli/890/042/.

On her leave, Pika Ghosh (Art) will complete writing her book, tentatively titled,
Envisioning Devotion: Experiments in Imagery and Ecstasy in Early Modern Bengali Temples. Specifically, she will write the third chapter, which addresses the creation of a new composite icon on the Keshta Ray Temple at Vishnupur (1655). This chapter will introduce multiple aspects of yoga and meditation as an alternate mode to ecstatic song and dance in the quest for the divine in the worship of the popular Hindu god Krishna.  Together, the new icon inside and its proliferation on the temple’s exterior sculpture, offer two modes of ascetic engagement with the divine: the path of the world renouncer, and the disinterested engagement of the householder.  And finally, Ghosh will suggest that creative resonances with earlier conceptualizations of Krishna, particularly his exhortation of detached fulfillment of responsibility in the Bhagavad Gita, indicate a creative adaptation of the long and rich heritage of Krishna worship to which this community laid claim.

Five faculty recipients of MEMS Research Support Awards look forward to working on exciting projects:

Reid Barbour (English/Comp Lit) plans to use the grant to conduct research in Norwich, England as part of my intellectual biography of the seventeenth-century physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne.

History professor Melissa Meriam Bullard plans to use her research travel grant this summer in the U.K., in Liverpool and London. She is researching the legacy of the Italian Renaissance in the Atlantic world. This summer she will be focusing on philanthropist William Roscoe, a self-styled, latter-day Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promoted the major cultural institutions founded in Liverpool in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His philanthropic efforts attracted the attention of Americans like writer Washington Irving and President Thomas Jefferson who found inspiration in his talent for combining commerce and culture and using the later to dignify the new wealth created by the former. Roscoe’s extensive correspondence is located in the Central Library and Public Record Office in Liverpool. Bullard will consult other important papers and early editions in the British Library in London.

Terence McIntosh (History) will use the MEMS Faculty Research Support Award during the summer to investigate the various ways in which German Protestant jurisconsults and churchmen, especially Pietists, developed new conceptions of confession and absolution during the eighteenth century. These views provide key insights into how and why the Lutheran clergy relaxed and reconceptualized its authority to punish immoral behavior, especially illicit sex, after 1700—a process that illuminates important dimensions of the Enlightenment and the long-term transformations in the relations between church and society. For this research project, he will consult manuscript and printed sources deposited in the Franckesche Stiftungen and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, both in Halle an der Saale, Germany, and in the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden.

A MEMS research support grant will allow Omid Safi (Religious Studies) to make two trips to Turkey.   He went there in March to look at the buildings built by Sinan in the city of Istanbul.   In May and June, Safi will return to Turkey, this time examining the legacy of Sinan in the Anatolian country side.   He will be looking at a wide range of monuments, mosques, shrines, Sufi houses, public baths, caravansarais, and bridges.  Safi is deeply grateful for the support given to me by MEMS in bringing this project to fruition.

Student Award Recipients

Frank Ryan and John Headley Dissertation Fellowship

Rob Policelli is the inaugural recipient of the prestigious Frank Ryan and John Headley Dissertation Fellowship for outstanding graduate students working in the area of the Renaissance (1350-1700). In the fall 2009 semester, Rob will be working on finalizing his dissertation, Italy Rewritten: Renaissance Historians and the calamità d’Italia, 1494-1555. The dissertation looks at the ways in which Renaissance historians, partially in response to a catastrophic period of foreign invasions, developed a wide range of Italian historical narratives. A dominant sense of Italia and its past never emerged, but a dynamic, intertextual dialogue about the issue did. That Renaissance dialogue, in both content and form, had implications for later historical discourses on Italia, including those on the eve of Italian unification in the nineteenth century. Rob is grateful that his work in the fall semester will be funded by the Ryan-Headley Fellowship.

Donald J. Gilman Award

Christopher Currie (Art) and Robert Policelli (History) are the first recipients of the Gilman award. This award will support doctoral research in any field in medieval and early modern studies. It is made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Donald W. Gilman, Jr., Professor of French at Ball State University, who received the AB and PhD degrees from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Gilman hopes that the award will “facilitate discovery, documentation, and the dissemination of knowledge in medieval and early modern studies.”

Three graduate students from the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and History report on how they will use their MEMS Dissertation Grants:

Matthew Lubin

History

Matthew Lubin, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, is undertaking research on the diplomatic consequences for the entire Mediterranean of the Cyprus War between Venice and the Ottomans in 1570-71, for the sixty or so years after that war. The MEMS dissertation grant allowed him to travel to Istanbul and then to Kyrenia and Nicosia, Cyprus, between December 2008 and May 2009, and to use Ottoman documents in both places to better round out his picture of political developments and strategic calculations during this important period. These findings have complemented his earlier work, in the Venice State Archive and in the Vatican Secret Archive, in 2008.

Katy Smith

History

My dissertation focuses on the lives of white, black, and Indian mothers in the early American South, exploring everything from their thoughts about childrearing to their more public roles as teachers, farmers, and even politicians. Having the MEMS Dissertation Fellowship this semester has allowed me to take several research trips to archives in neighboring states and to actually begin the process of writing the dissertation. As the semester comes to a close, I have written drafts of my first three chapters, an accomplishment which I could not have achieved without the support of MEMS. Thank you!

Nathaniel Stogdill

English

This grant will support my progress as I continue researching and writing my dissertation, The Experiments of Defeat: Royalist Disillusionment and the Development of Flexible Social Identity in Post-Civil War England. Through an assessment of the literature of the period, I argue that English subjects responded to the institutional failures exposed during the conflicts of the Civil War and Interregnum by imagining a social identity unmoored from the demands of stable authorities. I focus on the intersections of poetry and polemic in canonical authors -Jonson and Milton- as well as some of their less lauded contemporaries –Cowley, Stanley, Cavendish- to examine the experiments with alternative methods of making meaning in a confused culture.

Graduate Research Support Awards were given to six students this year in the departments of Art, English, History, and Romance Languages.

Krysta Black

Art

My MEMS research award will be used to conduct preliminary research this summer for my dissertation The León Bible of 960 and Early Spanish Bible Illustration, which focuses on the program of illustration of the Codex Biblicus Legionensis (León, Archivo Capitular, Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, cod. 2).  I will use my award to travel to the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University.  I also plan to visit the Morgan Library in New York to see the tenth-century Morgan Beatus.

Jonathan O’ Conner

Romance Languages

My dissertation research will center on Diego López de Ayala’s sixteenth-century Spanish translation of a fragment of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filocolo. The purpose of the study will be to consider the text within its context, i. e., as it may relate to phenomena such as attempts to establish a specialized printing industry similar to that of Giolito in Venice, the development of a prestigious literary vernacular, the importance of the sentimental novel, and attempts to establish a literary canon. I have used the MEMS research award to obtain a microfilm of the complete copy of the unpublished text from the Austrian National Library’s collection. I have also booked a trip to Madrid in July, where I will spend a couple of weeks doing research in the Biblioteca Nacional.

Nathaniel Stogdill

English

This award will fund research at four libraries with extensive early modern archives -the British Library in London, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, and the Folger Library in Washington, DC- in support of my dissertation, The Experiments of Defeat: Royalist Disillusionment and the Development of Flexible Social Identity in Post-Civil War England. My project requires that I account for contemporary responses to the texts that I examine. Each of these collections has significant holdings of my relevant texts and should provide the extensive marginalia necessary for me to develop my argument.

Benjamin Reed

History

I will be using my MEMS Graduate Research Support Award for a preliminary research

trip to Mexico City this summer during the months of June and July. My primary goals are to survey and, when possible, reproduce sermons and other archival material related to preaching in seventeenth century Mexico City. I plan to visit Mexico’s National Archive, the historical notarial archive, the Mexico City Cathedral archives and the CONDUMEX library, which contains a wide array of historical printed literature. I also hope to meet and foster professional contacts with scholars at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad Iberoamericana working on related research topics.

Faculty Conference Travel Grants were awarded to Reid Barbour (English), Carmen Hsu (ROML), Hassan Melehy (ROML), Ennio Rao (ROML), Ellen Welch (ROML), and Jessica Wolfe (English and Comparative Literature).

Graduate Conference Travel Grants were awarded to Brandon Essary (ROML), Matthew Lubin (History), Michael John Maher (ROML), Jocelyn McDaniel (German), Dustin Mengelkoch (English), Nicolay Ostrau (German), Jennifer Mi-Young Park (English), Mary Raschko (English), Nathaniel Stogdill (English), and Joseph Wallace (English).